Is a floral dress a political statement?

Rachel Tashjian

When the conservative youth group Turning Point USA was planning its recent Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Texas, organizers sent out a Pinterest mood board of suggested looks.

Amid a few images of sleeveless vests, skirt suits and pleated skirts were a number of floral dresses: some with puffed princess sleeves, others with a more casual, backyard-barnyard fit and a few that looked like vintage nightgowns.

The attendees either took note of the mood board or didn’t need it: reporting from the summit, Washington Post reporter Kara Voght described the attendees’ looks as “a smear of pastels and florals - ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls. The aesthetic could be summed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder-core, as if the little house on the prairie had been down the street from a Sephora.”

Is the floral dress now the uniform of the conservative “it” girl? Maybe as conservatives, especially millennials and Gen Z, become a cultural force rallying for women to take on more conventional roles of motherhood and homemaking, they are looking for the clothes that express, or align with, their worldview.

A look at the recent fashion history of prairie and sundress styles makes this notion head spinning. The first wave came almost a decade ago, when Batsheva Hay began producing clothes inspired by her childhood obsession with Laura Ashley’s Victoriana calico and floral printed dresses. Hay’s upbringing in Queens was far from Ashley’s very sincere life in the British countryside - the designer recalls reading that Ashley would bring fresh fruit from her farm into the office - but her printed prairie dresses, with puffed shoulders and ruffles on the cuffs and hems, became an unexpected hit, with celebrities like Chloë Sevigny, Natalie Portman and Erykah Badu wearing them out and about in New York and Los Angeles.

“The idea was that they were like a treat for me - these feminine, girly dresses that contrasted with my very corporate career as a lawyer, or that gave me something ‘modest’ or traditional to wear for Shabbat dinner that still allowed me to express myself,” Hay said. “It was very much winking at this old-fashioned femininity.”

Both Hay and her customers often wear the dresses with something unexpected: combat boots, or a baseball cap, or an outrageous lip color or hairstyle that make it clear the wearer is playing with these old-fashioned ideas about domesticity and womanhood. “A lot of women feel like they need to f--- it up somehow.”

Batsheva’s dresses became a symbol of female empowerment - a statement that you could embrace traditional femininity without looking the part of the oppressed housewife. Other brands launched in the years following that also seemed to celebrate a more “classic” concept of femininity with varying degrees of irony. New Yorker Sandy Liang has a cult following of Gen Z fans who love her ballerina-inspired sportswear. Then there is Doen, a line featuring simple nightgown-inspired dresses started by two sisters in California, as well as Loveshackfancy, a New York-based label that makes Laura Ashley-esque florals in much sexier cuts, often with bare midriffs or exposed hips.

Hay’s dresses continued in popularity as trends like cottagecore, a pandemic-era frenzy that romanticized country life, and modest fashion began permeating women’s wardrobes. But increasingly, Hay says, she has seen dresses on conservative women - women like Hannah Neeleman, also known as Ballerina Farm on social media, who is often considered the beacon of the tradwife movement - that very much resemble hers.

“It’s really fascinating to see,” Hay said. “They take the idea of these dresses, this romanticized idea of living in the country, and interpret it very earnestly.” Cottagecore practitioners were just fantasizing that they wanted to move to the country and become a stay-at-home moms - until something shifted and a lot of women suddenly, sincerely, wanted to.

Last year, Evie Magazine, which is often called Cosmo for new conservatives, released what it calls the “Raw Milkmaid Dress,” a fitted frock with puffed sleeves and a plunging neckline that emphasizes the décolletage and hugs the waist. It recalls the simple white dresses Marie Antoinette had made for her respites at the Petit Trianon, where (in a presaging of the cottagecore movement, perhaps) she played house and pet barnyard animals to escape the complex voyeurism of Versailles.

Brittany Hugoboom, Evie’s founder, said in an email interview that her team designed the dress for a cover story with Neeleman when they couldn’t find the perfect milkmaid dress for their photo shoot. Hugoboom pointed to shows like “Bridgerton” as the reason behind the revival of milkmaid styles. “We took all our favorite elements from 18th-century French ‘peasant’ dresses, Regency era bodices, pieces worn in iconic films, and made it modern enough that supermodels would wear it to brunch,” she said.

Evie has also introduced “The Perfect Sundress,” a style with a built-in bra, which Hugoboom says sold out in 48 hours. “Evie was always envisioned as a ‘one-stop shop for femininity,’” said Hugoboom, whose publication is perhaps best-known for its Instagram account, with over 220,000 followers double-tapping posts that celebrate a traditional brand of femininity: the hottest guys of all time, “how to stay madly in love with your husband” and clips of tradwives like Nara Smith speaking about the challenges of motherhood. She plans to introduce more clothes in the future.

“Instead of competing with men, many of us want to lean into our feminine traits like beauty, sensuality, softness, and charm,” she said. “In recent years, trends have shifted toward women dressing for other women. We’ll clock a Row handbag or a Khaite top and nod. But a lot of trends, like mom jeans or oversize blazers, aren’t looks men love. So our goal was simple: dresses that women love to wear and men love to see women wearing. We love men, and we love being women. To me, it’s a sign that the gender wars may finally be cooling off.”

Biz Sherbert, a brand consultant and writer who often covers beauty standards and style in the second Trump era, describes conservative style not through a garment, per se. “A lot of people are trying to define it because so much value is placed on it,” she said. “Like, ‘these are the women we’re fighting for,’ or ‘this is what we need to preserve.’” Melania Trump may be the face of American conservative womanhood, but she most often wears highly tailored, almost armor-like styles that seem to protect her like a shell, along with tall spiked heels. It’s far from the romantic styles of cottagecore.

Sherbert also sees women on the right making tweaks to more traditional styles, but they are in the name of sex appeal instead of eccentricity - a high neck top with a very short skirt, or pearls with a minidress. “There’s an implicit sense of how a man would see this,” she said. “A woman might say, ‘Oh, that dress is cute.’ But the real deciding factor would be a man saying, ‘Oh, that’s not a vibe.’”

For Sherbert, the turning point when ultrafeminine styles moved from cheeky to sincere was the mania around tiny little bows in late 2023. “On the TikTok shop, I would see Trump 2024 merchandise that was super coquette,” she said, referring to the TikTok aesthetic that emphasized ultra girly femininity. “It was using this visual language that I had seen come up through Sandy Liang and people inspired by her,” said Sherbert. “It was this brand of pastiche femininity that was so strong, and people [described as] reclaiming girlhood, but no one could ever substantiate why that was radical. It was vaguely feminist but ill-defined.”

So how could so many women see different things in the same dress? “People are consuming a lot of the same content, and then they go down different ideological rabbit holes,” she said. “Maybe in this case, Republicans or conservatives are better at walking the walk of these lifestyles: They’re actually going to go homestead. I’m not just going to live in Brooklyn and have this cottagecore fantasy.”

Many of those in the new conservative movement, Sherbert pointed out, have been influenced by the culture and politics of an over-scrutinized New York neighborhood called Dimes Square, a pandemic party zone that nurtured a sense of skepticism around the left. Incidentally, Sandy Liang’s shop is right in the middle, and Batsheva is just a few blocks away.